The photo-based qualitative interview: Potential applications to market research and current challenges

Photos have become an important part of private and public communication due to technical and digital developments. Photo-based qualitative interviews are capable not only of investigating subjective and implicit conditions, but also of making use of the everyday social practice of taking pictures. The goal of this article is to demonstrate the applicability of the photo-based qualitative interview to market research and to identify and discuss practical research challenges. We conclude that the method used to analyze the data from photo-based qualitative interviews must be able to consider the idiosyncrasies of pictures, to handle a vast number of photos, and to combine photo and text analyses.